Retention

If you wait until an exit interview to find out why a valuable employee has decided to move on, you've missed a golden opportunity — not just to keep a productive member of your team but to identify and fix issues within your organisation before you lose others.

 Employee retention is a critical issue as companies compete for talent in a tight economy. The costs of employee turnover are increasingly high — as much as 2.5 times an employee's salary depending on the role. And there are other “soft costs”: lowered productivity, decreased engagement, training costs and cultural impact.

 How can you increase retention rates? You should start at the very beginning of the recruitment process.

Retention starts with recruiting

Actively recruit women. All things being equal, a woman who’s the most qualified person for a job would always get it, but it turns out that all things aren’t fair, and discriminatory hiring practices – especially the ones driven by unconscious bias – restrict the number of women in the workforce from the get-go.

Retention begins from the application process to screening applicants to choosing who to interview.

 It starts with identifying what aspects of culture and strategy you want to emphasise and then seeking those out in your candidates.

 It's an increasing returns model; the longer someone's with your company, the more productive they become over time. You have to look at this as a long game, and take steps to ensure you're doing it right by making sure each employee is wholly engaged with and part of the company's ongoing success.

 Actively recruiting women for your company helps improve your ratio of men-to-women, and by strengthening how many women are represented at your company, you build the foundation for future improvements (and reduce potential footholds for toxicity to grow). It’s harder to ignore the needs of women when they make up a more significant proportion of your workforce.

 Provide ongoing education and clear paths to advancement

 Promoting from within not only provides a clear way to higher compensation and responsibility, but it also helps employees feel that they're valued and a crucial part of the company's success.

 Actively promote women. Women, even when they perform at the highest levels, are more likely to get passed over for promotion due to implicit bias, the sense that women “aren’t as good” at leadership: companies with more women in leadership positions outperform their male-only counterparts. By creating opportunities for women to succeed by seeking out candidates for promotion among them, you both normalise women in leadership roles while reducing the all-male management that ignores their concerns.

 Of course, promotions go hand-in-hand with employee development and education, and this should be another tool in your retention arsenal. Whether by corporate training to help foster the acquisition of new skills, new technologies or new processes or through tuition reimbursement from outside courses, furthering your employees' education can help them feel valued and invested in the company.

 According to new research from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), high-skills training (80 per cent) and professional development programs to hone soft skills (74 per cent) are perceived among the top benefits for retaining employees’ services over the next five years.

 Learning cannot just be an afterthought — it must be a core focus of any healthy organisation. When education is part of your culture, it doesn’t stand out as something outside the norm. For example, a learning-focused organisation doesn’t just hold periodic learning events or workshops separate from the day-to-day work. Instead, learning is integrated into every project or task, and employees are encouraged to dive in and learn by doing, asking questions when they hit problems. In other words, constant learning should be a part of every employee’s job description.

 Investing in your employees’ education can help retain talent and intellectual property at a time when there's stiff competition for both. The need for new skill sets and evolving roles are in demand at a rapidly growing rate, so putting someone on a career path that doesn’t have any room to develop is not only a career-limiting move for the employee but a business-limiting move for the company.

 By helping employees gain skills they can both apply in their current role, or build on to work towards getting a promotion, you're keeping them engaged, excited and invested in your company — you're making them want to stay.

 Career Frameworks

 Recognise the meaning of a career framework. A career framework is a set of guidelines that shows employees how they can move between jobs within the organisation while ensuring that their career development aligns with current business needs of the organisation.

 It allows employees to take ownership of their career development and creates open communication about strengths and opportunities for improvement.

 Having a career framework can help organisations understand where their talent is concentrated, how prepared they are to meet future human resources challenges and how key employees can be developed and retained, while simultaneously improving the effectiveness of the organisation.

 Management

Most people don't quit their jobs; they quit their managers, understanding that your organisation's management philosophy could be part of the problem is the first step to improving retention.

You have to manage to each, and invest time into discovering what each member of a team needs both at work and outside of work to do their job to the best of their ability, do your employees feel:

·  Are they all in this together?

·  Their suggestions, concerns and challenges are acknowledged and, when possible, acted upon?

·   Valued? Are they being listened to, or just heard? 

While it may sound inconsequential, simply listening to employees' concerns and doing what you can to address those — or at least explaining why they can't be addressed at present — can go a long way toward keeping the best and brightest.

 One manager with poor people skills can do damage to the culture and effectiveness of a company in a short period — managers need to be people-orientated and able to harness their team's talent and passion. Middle managers are a significant force in accomplishing the business objectives and are essential to the overall culture.

 Managers

Once you’ve identified problem managers, you need to dig a little deeper. Many problematic managers are simply talent that was promoted before they were ready and ill-equipped to deal with the demands and nuances of management.

Skills that make an employee a great engineer, for example, are entirely different from those required for management. You need to provide the necessary training and guidance to help your managers lead and manage their teams.

A critical mistake organisation can assume that if someone is excellent at their day job, they'll be great at leading and managing people, one of the easiest ways to lose people is to misalign them with their daily duties. Organisations need to train people to be managers. Invest the time in developing, coaching and mentoring your managers; people are promoted into management and then are left to fend for themselves.

In addition to offering managerial growth options, consider offering opportunities for succession that are lateral or that result in non-managerial roles. Have clear career pathways for managers and supervisors as well as people who want to stay in an individual contributor path. Business relationship managers are good examples of people that can make an impact in this regard. They don't have to manage people to drive real and meaningful business results.

There’s no room to grow

Provide women with professional development opportunities. Due to the relative difficulty they face in finding employment and advancing in position, women are much more likely to have shallower CVs and less chance to network. That means you need to create opportunities for women to get that experience, through mentoring programs, outside educational opportunities, leadership seminars, and other chances to get real, hands-on experience that may have otherwise not been available to them. The sad reality is that women require better performance and more experience than their male colleagues to get as far; bridging these gaps is vital.

One of the main reasons top performers leave is because they feel that their career advancement isn't going as planned. It doesn't matter if they like what they're working on, who they're working with and are compensated fairly or more than fairly. They have to feel there's something in it for them personally, otherwise, they will be tempted to search for employment elsewhere, or be susceptible to recruiters.

But what if you don't have any non-managerial career paths or employees don't want to become managers? Your best individual contributors aren't always going to want to manage people. So you need to build a career path for them, or they will find another organisation that does.

Make sure employees are aware of available opportunities to grow and to expand their knowledge. One of the key things — if you're listening to employees — is to find out if they are getting the resources to add to and change their roles, to take on more and different responsibilities, to spearhead new projects, to experiment.

Most people don't want to come to a job every day and just slog through, doing the same thing day after day. They want to learn new things, try new things, and if you can support their efforts to do that, you'll inspire loyalty, and that can help with retention.

You’re not checking in regularly

 If your managers aren’t offering constructive feedback on a regular basis or they don’t talk about career goals at least once a year with employees, then your organisation is at risk of falling out of touch with your talent. While once a year performance reviews are the minimum, most experts agree that more frequent reports are better, especially with millennials.

The more frequently you can have performance discussions, the easier it is to catch and correct a problem and support great behaviour or performance. Having a structured and pointed career development session every six months with the employees on your teams can add tremendous value when it comes to growth, engagement and retention.

Regular feedback will also give you more warning when people are feeling dissatisfied or disengaged. Recognise and reward your employees for their outstanding work. Money isn't always the top motivator, so you've got to know on an individual basis what motivates your top talent. It could be internal recognition, a promotion, extra annual leave or a flexible work schedule. But you have to ask.

 The biggest impact companies can make to recognise and reward solid performance; it can take the form of a pat on the back for a job well done, financial incentives, or even promotions and giving high performers more responsibility.

Your workplace policies are too rigid

 Flexible work time and the ability to be a virtual employee are so prevalent in today's workforce that they are becoming an expectation. The ability to work a flexible schedule can be a great way to retain professionals.